Abstract

Session

Control Mechanisms

Paper

2-1

Full Paper

ps.gz

Title

Equation-Based Congestion Control for Unicast Applications

Author(s)

Sally Floyd (AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI)
Mark Handley (AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI)
Jitendra Padhye (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Joerg Widmer (AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI)

Abstract:

This paper proposes a mechanism for equation-based congestion control for unicast traffic in the Internet. Most best-effort traffic in the current Internet is well-served by the dominant transport protocol TCP. However, some unicast traffic could find use for a TCP-friendly congestion control mechanism that refrains from reducing the sending rate in half in response to a single packet drop. Instead of decreasing the sending rate in response to each packet drop, with our mechanism the sender explicitly adjusts its sending rate as a function of the measured packet drop rate. We use both simulations and experiments over the Internet to explore performance.
Equation-based congestion control is also a promising avenue of development for congestion control of multicast traffic, and so an additional reason for this work is to lay a sound basis for the later development of multicast congestion control. In this paper we briefly discuss the lessons of this work for multicast congestion control.